Confluences by Philippe Nigro

Confluences is a new collection of upholstered seating that French designer Philippe Nigro has created for the furniture manufacturer Ligne Roset.

From Ligne Roset:

CONFLUENCES is a breath of fresh air which breaks with all the normal conventions of upholstered furniture. This piece will please not only lovers of radical design, but also all those who are seduced by a multiplicity of possible sitting positions, and the as yet unheard-of conviviality offered by its colourful, unbridled compositions with evocative names such as the ‘Toi et moi’ (‘You and me’) love seat, the ‘small conversation settee’ and ‘large conversation settee’, or the 4-seat settee with two integral chaises longue.

At first glance, CONFLUENCES appears to be the fruit of the designer’s creative musings on the theme of uncompromising volumes. And yet, one will be amazed to discover that it is simply the result of a reasoned approach on the part of the designer, with a view to offering the best possible response to customer demand for personalised comfort.

Born in Nice in 1975, Philippe Nigro, a graduate of the Ecole Boulle, Paris (School of Fine Arts), works as an independent designer and also, since 1999, as assistant to Michele de Lucchi, the renowned Milan-based designer of the Tolomeo light.

Philippe Nigro has already undertaken a huge variety of design projects, both for prominent furniture manufacturers (Poltrona Frau, Felicerossi, Danese, Alias, Nube…) and for well-known brands in other fields, such as Olivetti, Compaq, Telecom Italia, Poste Italiana or Van Cleef and Arpels. In 2006, he collaborated with Michele de Lucchi on three new lamps for Artemide.

Onto this background Philippe Nigro expresses the full richness of his creativity in the shape of CONFLUENCES, his new collection of upholstery. His innovative puzzle-type design affords hitherto unprecedented liberty in terms of form, as well as demanding the highest possible level of workmanship, something which is only possible thanks to Ligne Roset’s depth and breadth of experience as a manufacturer of furniture. CONFLUENCES is doubtless one of the bedrocks of the new trend for ‘counterforms’, with its characteristic overlapping arrangement of elements in the style of a puzzle or yin-yang.

Philippe Nigro:
“How can one dream up a settee capable of satisfying the greatest possible number of users? Their body shapes, their tastes? The CONFLUENCES settee unites them all, for it draws its inspiration from variety.”

One possible answer was to offer a variety of seat depths and back heights on a single settee, in order to match the comfort with the expectations of the individual user. This approach naturally came with the disadvantage of having to make varying proportions work in a harmonious way in terms of form.

The success of CONFLUENCES, inspired by contemporary art, rests on the repetition, addition and direct stringing together of different volumes. In this way, a number of seats offering a variety of sitting positions are brought close and locked together; simple, almost neutral lines are used in order to enable the formal fusion of their volumes: the seat platforms flow together, overlapping each other as if in a giant puzzle, connected by nuances of shade. Without symmetry and without any visible regularity, this principal is endlessly usable and makes it possible to create a wide variety of pieces, all of which both different and surprising, almost with a life of their own: 2-seater, 3-seater, 4-seater with lounge seat, fireside chair, Vis-à-vis.

“In so far as it attempts to solve an ergonomic problem, CONFLUENCES becomes a plastic and colourful way of playing with countless permutations.”

Each piece of CONFLUENCES seating unites varying seat heights and seat depths and offers new, entirely unstructured forms in the service of a great variety of sitting positions and personalisation of comfort, supported by a well-considered combination of varying densities of foam. The personalisation is so extensive that the left and right-hand versions of the 3-seater with lounge seat are not exactly symmetrical.

The mobile occasional table, which can also be used as an armrest, is quite deliberately an asymmetrical, unique piece, whilst the lumbar cushions, filled with pure down, also contribute to the general adaptability and freedom of use. Finally, the colour combinations chosen underscore the unstructured nature of the CONFLUENCES seating. Each item is available in a monocolour or multicolour interpretation. Philippe Nigro himself has suggested 27 possible colour combinations in a variety of covering materials.